That follows my Tuesday morning story[2] and blog post[3] based on a Monday interview with CSU President Tony Frank, who fired Graham last week.

Here are Graham comments that didn’t make the story; or, in some instances, some comments from the story placed in full context.

The main story discusses such things as whether there could have been other flashpoints and issues that led to Graham’s firing, and it’s best to read that first for context.

Here, Graham almost exclusively talks about the stadium:

“I think the stadium is at the core of this conversation, there’s no question, and that’s the issue from my perspective.”

“I was hired by Tony, and he literally put in the letter than he used to hire me, to be bold, think big, work hard, settle for nothing less than excellence. He was charging me with attracting great people, changing the culture and delivering results. I think we accomplished that. We did deliver those results. We hired some great coaches … I’m very happy we were able to extend their contracts so significantly with bilateral provisions that make it difficult for them to walk away. I think we’ve secured some great coaches. They in turn are attracting great student-athletes.

“Overall, the culture has been embraced. I talked all the time about you have to do it all, you have to be a person of character, you have to succeed academically and you have to win. You have to deliver results. We’ve moved from me talking about that all the time to the student athletes talking with each other about that. The culture has caught on and we’re seeing it show up in the results.

“The stadium is the other piece. I was not hired to build a football stadium. It was an idea that Tony and I discussed during the process of talking about me joining the university. Then sometime after I had been hired, the decision was made to see if we could make this thing happen. I think we made great progress on the stadium, phenomenal progress on the stadium at every level. From the design perspective, we made great progress. It’s a building that we’re all going to be really, really proud of, number one, and number two, the capital campaign is going extremely well, also.

“I became concerned a few weeks ago when for the first time, we started to release numbers about specifically what had been raised around the capital campaign. Our vice president of development, Brett Anderson, reported that about $20 million had been raised. And that’s less than half of the actual number. I became concerned at that point that things weren’t being accurately represented. That always causes you to have some concern. So I started to have concern at that point.

“The reality is that we have raised $45 million. Brett has explained that what he reported was the amount of money that had actually been fully documented, and that it did not include money that had been committed to us verbally, in emails, et cetera, that was in the process of being documented. We’ve been counting those numbers for the entire 15 months that we’ve been tracking this project. To leave those numbers out is I think a misrepresentation of what we had actually accomplished. So we’re at $44.7 million, $45 million for simplicity, and there’s an additional $15 million that’s in the funnel and pending that we have every confidence will be secured between now and the end of October, which is important because that’s the board meeting.

“So my confidence that we were going to be at $60 million or more by the time we got together with the board was very, very high, and that we would be able to demonstrate to the board that we had made material and very good progress toward achieving the goal. There’s been some discussion recently that the number’s 110, not 75. We’ve always been geared up and gunning for a $75 million figure. The external number has been $110 million. But from the very beginning back in 2012, when we started this process, you might remember back then the building was going to be a $246 million project and the mandate was go out and raise half of that amount in capital and we’ll bond, borrow, money against the remainder. So our goal was roughly $125 million.

“Literally within days of that being stated and declared by Tony as the goal and approved by the board, we had a meeting that included Brett Anderson, and Brett made clear that there’s no way we could raise $125 million — it was just an unachievable level of money, never been done in the history of collegiate athletics, et cetera, and if we were able to get to $75 million, it would be a great accomplishment. We instantly started to migrate toward the internal goal of $75 million. The goal that has been stated publicly and the board has approved is $110 million, but the internal goal was clearly set at $75 million and a plan was developed around that to get the financing completed. And that included Tony needing to go to the board and get the board to approve borrowing $125 million.

“So instead of the 50-50 ratio, it would be that we would borrow $125 million on the basis that the revenue coming out of the building could support that debt service. Ticket sales, concessions, sponsorships, partnerships, and so on. So the board would need to improve $125 million, and that plus the $75 million would get us to $200 million. We took money out of the project, so we reduced the cost of the project from a $246 million building down to a $225 million building and now it’s down to $220 million. But that was one of the objectives of this internal plan, too, to take expense out. We integrated academic space into the building to enable the academic space to share in the cost of infrastructure. We were able to get the total cost of the building down to $220 million.

“So between the $75 million of capital and the $125 million of bond financing debt, we’re at $200 million and then the plan was to go back to the board and say to the board, rather than investing the $30 million that will have to be spent on Hughes, let’s invest that instead in the new stadium. And that covers the cost of financing. So that was the internal discussion, and that’s what we were geared up to deliver. And for us to be at $60 million by October, at that point what needed to be accomplished was Tony working with his board of directors to approve the $125 million in bond financing and the $30 million reinvestment of the money for Hughes Stadium re-invested into the new stadium. With that, we would have gotten it done.

“There was one other piece that Tony has to get completed with the board and that was we would have to find some bridge financing to build the stadium. All the donations are coming in in the form of pledges, typically over a five-year period, or estate gifts. So if Terry Frei says I’ll give you $5,000 to the stadium, you pay your first $1,000 when the governing board says build the building and the other $4,000 gets paid in annual installments. It’s a five-year pledge. So we don’t have all of that money upfront. We have to borrow money with bridge financing in order to pay for the stadium. The same is true of an estate gift. If Jack Graham at the age of 62 gives an estate gift, I’m hoping that I’m going to live for a while and it’s going to take a while before that cash is actually realized. So again, you need perhaps as much as $75 million to $100 million of bridge financing. The department of athletics certainly didn’t have the money to do that, and so he was going to pick that up. It wasn’t clear to me whether Tony had gotten an agreement from his board to do that or not.

“When I saw the numbers being released as low as they were, I had a conversation with Tony. He told me yes, this was going to be represented to the board as not successful in achieving the $110 million capital goal, and I objected strongly. I objected strongly that within the context of the internal plan that we had adopted with each other … that we were very much on track, and in fact from my perspective we were on the doorstep of a great success. So it was hard for me to swallow and absorb this idea that it was going to be described as a failure because I just didn’t see it that way.”

On whether CSU booster Pat Stryker was aboard on the new stadium:

“I spoke with Pat very early in the process, before it was even announced that we were going forward with the stadium, and I was told by Tony that other people inside the university would own that relationship. So I wasn’t part of that conversation.”

On whether the stadium is dead:

“I don’t think so and I sure hope not. I think it’s so critical to the future of our university and to the future of our athletics that this thing succeed. There are paths to success. There absolutely are paths to success. I’ve had lots of donors call me over the last three or four days who are upset and have said they’re going to pull their pledges, pull their donations from the stadium capital campaign and I’ve asked every one of them to take a deep breath, just hold on, it’s not about me, it’s about the university, it’s about athletics at Colorado State, so let’s take a deep breath here and see what our next steps are. If in fact we are successful to get the board to agree to permit us to borrow $125 million, they’ll redirect $30 million that would have been spent on Hughes, which is such a rational decision, that’s $155 million right there. The need would be for us to generate enough money to build a quality building. Right now, it’s a $220 million building, and if we’re at $155 million and we raise another $50 million, we’re at $205 million and you’d have to take a number of things out of the building to get down to that. That concerns me a lot, but let’s hold on to the funding, let’s get to the $75 million that we’ve always talked about.

“I’m going to do all I can privately, even though I’m not the director of athletics, to just hold on and take a deep breath and let’s make this thing happen anyway. I don’t want to see us modify the design of this building on the back of, ‘Well, we can add to it later.’ That rarely happens. Building a football stadium is a lot like building a web site. If you go to a web site and you have a bad experience the first time you go, you don’t go back. I don’t think we can afford to build a tin cup. I think we need to build a quality stadium, something we can take great pride in. So let’s get this capital campaign completed, let’s hold on to the funding that we’ve got. I have every confidence that we’re going to be at $60 million by October, and that remaining $15 million is not difficult to complete. It does take time and work, but it absolutely can be accomplished. I would encourage Tony and the board to keep pressing forward and get this thing done and not abandon the project.

“The positive news of this event is that it has been a catalyst to case Tony to start talking about the things that need to done with the board — $125 million in financing, $30 million investment in the new stadium of the maintenance money that would have gone to Hughes, and getting approval of the bridge financing. Those are all critical matters. None of those things have been discussed publicly for the last 12 to 15 months. I certainly wish that they had been. I think we’re getting to the essence of some really important conversations,. particularly since from moment one, the decision was we couldn’t get to $125 million or $110 million, that $75 million really was the internal goal. We’re really talking about these things in a public way in the public light, where they belong. They should have been there from the beginning.”